Exploring two 'Greatest Pictures' CD-roms

I’ve been making some homemade CDs for friends and family. At first I simply burned the CD and handed over a white unmarked and boring CD. What I needed was a personalized CD case, something with soul. The standard CD plastic cases are not expensive, but nevertheless I went to a local second-hand bookstore, which also sells music, and asked if they had any CDs they could part with. Indeed, they would sell me copies of Greatest Pictures CD-rom for 1 DKK a piece, so I naturally bought 20. It had never crossed my mind what was actually on these CDs as I’ve just thrown them out whenever I needed the case. Today I decided to investigate it.

I only have Greatest Pictures 3 and Greatest Pictures 5 and the CD does not indicate how many is in this elusive series. It is made by a now defunct Danish company MediaProducts A/S as they went bankrupt in 2001. Naturally, I ripped the CDs of everything and uploaded it to archive.org and can be seen here and here. It seems most of this stuff is in the open domain, but the CDs do not specify it explicitly. The CDs consist of an executable that I sadly cannot run, but the CD speaks of a slideshow application amongst other things. The CDs consist of exactly 2018 pictures in total all of which are in .gif format (not animated). The pictures are split into 15 categories which are listed below with a small description.

• Animals: Dogs, cats, birds, exotic animals and the like.
• Anime: A lot of anime girls and mechas. I think most of them are screenshots from their respective series. Nonetheless, I am not very known in this subject so I do not immediadately reckognize any of them.
• Art: Drawings, classical & modern paintings and old photographs. There are also a surprising amount of album cover art from the likes of The Cure, Iron Maiden etc.
• Cars: Modern cars, classical cars, motorcycles.
• Celebrity: Random assortment of celebrities with featuring an abnormally large amount of stills from Doctor Who and Star Trek.
• Compgfx: Computer graphics, 3D renders and technical demos. This is probably my favourite category due to the hilariously outdated raytracing and the glossification of every object in the scene.
• Drawings: Drawings or computer graphics. Most of these are quite poor quality.
• Faces: Mostly faces of women but also celebrities. Probably the category with the worst average image resolution.
• Fantasy: Dragons, castles, magic and futurism. Many of the works pertain to the World of TRS but I am unsure if they are from the book itself or fanart as I haven’t access to it.
• Lingerie: Suggestive women in lingerie. This is the most not safe for work folder out of all them, practically bordering on soft-core porn.
• Nature: Natural landscapes, space pictures, urban environments and houses.
• Mix: Everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Contains a large amount of scans of beer coasters.
• People: Slice of life pictures of people in their natural habitats. Includes some celebrities and sportsfolk. There are a lot of figure skating pictures
• Trains: Old trains, new trains and even a single train wreck.
• Swimsuit: Merely women in swimsuits. Much like the Women category.
• Women: Models, conventionally attractive women but also women in sports. Features a lot of pin-up like pictures but no nudity. Asian women are largely overrepresented. This is also by far the largest category.

I went through all 2018 pictures and chose 192 (187 due to image format issues) pictures which I found the most interesting or telling of the general content on the CDs. To do this, I used the image tagging and archiving software Hydrus for speeding up the process. The pictures are generally low quality and in GIF-format totalling at 44 MB for all 192 pictures. Below I made them into a large collage and below that is an imgur gallery showing all 192 pictures in full resolution.